Office of Analysis, Assessment and Accreditation

Tableau and Google Analytics Events

The Office of AAA at USU has recently moved our Tableau Data Vizualizations to a Tableau Server environment. Instead of simply embedding workbooks from Tableau Public, we're now using the Data API to load and interact with embedded Vizualizations on our webpages. We immediately noticed that we'd be losing the URL parameters that we had been using to track (into a local database) how people interact with our Viz's. I decided to use Google Analytics Events, and track when someone hits one of the dropdowns on our site to manipulate a Viz. Every time someone
interacts with one of our Viz's, it fires off one of Google's Javascript events.

Events allow 3 levels of detail "Event Category", "Event Action" and "Event Label". Since we had already been using events to track links to PDF's etc., we decided to make a new Event Category for the Tableau Viz's. Then we used the Event Action to differentiate between the pages that host the Viz's. So we get a separate Event Action for our Enrollment Viz and our Course Viz. Then using the Event Label, when someone manipulates the dropdowns on the page to interact with the Viz and presses the submit button, we grab all the values of the dropdowns and send them to Google as an Event Label (pipe delimited). In this way we're able to get a very granular view of how people are actually interacting with the Viz's.

Our Data Viz guy, Allan, has used Tableau's native connector to Google Analytics to attach, pull down the Events and create a cool bubble chart to show what sort of things are getting "Event hits" on our site.

Happy Tableau'ing from The Office of Analysis. Brett \m/

The Office of AAA at USU has recently moved our Tableau Data Visualizations to a Tableau Server environment. Instead of simply embedding workbooks from Tableau Public, we're now using the Data API to load and interact with embedded visualizations on our webpages.

We use Tableau's connector to Google Analytics to attach show what data users are viewing.

We wanted to track how people interact with our visualizations - so we decided to use Google Analytics "Events" - when someone makes a choice by clicking on a dropdown box (a parameter) it gets counted.

Events allow for three levels of detail:

"Event Category" - we decided to make a new Event Category for Tableau;

"Event Action" - we used the Event Action to differentiate between each Visualization; and

"Event Label" - when someone manipulates the dropdowns on the page to interact with the Visualization

We are now able to get a very granular view of how people interact with the data.